Traditional building materials for covering exterior surfaces of structures, such as walls or roofs, have included, for example, wooden shingles (some of which are known as shake shingles), cementitious tiles, baked clay tiles (for example Spanish tiles) and other well known, often made of naturally occurring, materials. These materials have enjoyed long standing acceptance, due both to their availability and attractiveness, in the trades. As a result of their familiarity, workmen are well acquainted with their use and techniques for their application.
Such materials do, however, have their drawbacks. In most cases, such materials are brittle, and thus subject to cracking and/or breakage upon exposure to adverse conditions, the brittleness of such materials often increasing with age, and are subject to shortened life due to sun and moisture exposure. When replacement is thus required of a unit of such material, large areas of the units must be taken up to effect the replacement.
In the case of cementitious and/or baked clay tiles, their use dramatically increases the load supported by load bearing structures in areas of their application. In the case of wooden materials, additional hazard in case of fire is documented, and, in the case of wooden shingles, their use is discouraged or even banned in some areas where fire danger is high. Wooden materials are also subject to degradation in the presence of fungus, certain insects, and the like, and require a heavier, and thus more expensive, underlayment to assure moisture sealing of the surface.
It would thus be desirable to provide a material to substitute for such traditional materials which is more resilient and flexible (and thus more easily replaced in case of unit failure), comparatively light weight, less susceptible to burning and attack by organisms, and which exhibits better water shedding and/or sealing characteristics, while substantially duplicating the appearance of the traditional materials and requiring no retraining of workers to effect its application to a structure (preferably being applied to a surface in substantially the same manner as the material after which its appearance is modeled).
While a variety of substitute materials have been suggested (see, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,193,898, 4,226,069, 3,855,753, 4,366,197, 4,015,392, 4,592,185, 4,932,184, 4,343,126, 4,598,522, 4,290,248, and 3,835,609), these have not addressed one or more of the above stated goals, typically providing relatively rigid panel-type units which require special structures and/or techniques for their application to a surface, which do not closely emulate the appearance of the materials substituted for, and which require replacement of an entire panel upon loss of unit integrity, often resulting in inability to match color (due to aging of surrounding panels) and/or undue repair effort and/or expense. Further improvement could thus still be utilized.